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If anyone is a bona fide cat person, it’s Professor Alan Wilson. To track cheetahs, he built a plane from scratch and learnt how to fly it. He was one of the researchers featured in the final episode of Big Cats (BBC One) – but he had stiff competition.

Kevin Richardson had lived alongside lions to study their behaviour (at one moment a lioness wrapped him up in what looked like the world’s scariest cuddle). Then we met Dr Andrew Hearne, who had dedicated 12 years to the rare Borneo Bay Cat, in which time he’d managed to capture just 60 images.

It’s a good thing the results could be so exciting. Mountain lions, for example, were thought to be solitary, or “lonely”, as narrator Bertie Carvel purred. In a concrete industrial complex in Africa, a surprisingly large number of serval cats had moved in. Why? The animals were drawn by the rodents that had populated the man-made reservoirs.

The relationship between predators and humans wasn’t always harmonious and the film showed how people were working to mitigate inevitable conflict as species adapted to the urban sprawl.

Mumbai residents painting spots on their dogs to make them look like leopardsCredit:
BBC

In Mumbai, an educational programme had reduced the number of leopard attacks on people. Dogs, however, were still unlucky. The solution? Paint the canine with spots. No self-respecting dog wants to be dressed up as a cat.

Considering how elusive cats are, the footage was impressive, from wide shots of a pride strutting through the dust to the detail of a cheetah’s pale amber eyes. The narrative was forward-thinking, intelligent and full of intriguing facts, stories and people.

At the end of the episode, a couple of Iberian Lynx were released. As they leapt across the hills, the crowd cheered. Just 15 years ago, the species was on the brink of extinction. There is hope for the big – and the little – cats.